Mr. Gavin Kelly:

I thank Deputy McGuinness for his questions. A lot of consideration was given to the coverage of the post offices across each county before reaching a decision. In Carlow-Kilkenny, for example, there are 34 post offices between the two counties. Our negotiations so far have been directly with An Post and we would not be privy to the onward negotiations between An Post and the local postmasters.

As we said earlier, scale is important. We are not the first bank to use the post office but building up the scale and volume of transactions will make a significant difference to customers and to postmasters in terms of viability going forward.

The more services we can put into the post offices, the better. I believe we are helping and contributing towards that. Any other questions on that would need to be directed at the post office.

On the specific locations, in the south east we looked at counties Carlow, Kilkenny, Waterford and Wexford together. There was a strong affinity between the Graiguenamanagh branch and the sub-office in New Ross in the past. While there is a lot of rivalry on the hurling pitch between Kilkenny and Wexford, from an economic and banking perspective, we certainly see a lot of work and co-operation from the local economies as they support each other. That is the way we will run our business to give support to customers, as the Chairman said, in thriving counties. We believe we have adequate coverage across those four counties to ensure we support our customers as we move forward.

Kilkenny is a very important county to us. We employ almost 600 people and have a very large contact centre operation in Kilkenny. Making sure we support colleagues and customers in Kilkenny is very important to us and will be close to our hearts as we go forward.